12 Oct 2000 DrCode   » (Journeyer)

Say, dancer, sounds like your trip is going smoothly, or at the least, that the food is good!

Exult

The development group has pretty much evaporated, probably because there's not much to do. I'm finishing up a few minor features, and will then release an Alpha. This cleaning/debugging phase is the hardest part of any software project (because it's so boring), and I can understand why some open-source projects fall apart at this point.

Work

When I interviewed, they explained to me how their software (all command-line) was developed under Windows, and so, unfortunately, was completely dependent on MFC container classes, and that it would be a huge job to rewrite. Therefore, I'd have to do my development on a Windows platform.

Well.... they were right about it being a huge amount of code (over 150K lines), and that I wouldn't want to rewrite it. Yet, the MFC functionality used (just CArray, CMap, CString, and CList) is easily duplicated in STL. So, having some experience in STL from my open-source project (thanks to Dancer), I didn't find it too difficult to write a wrapper that translates the MFC container classes/methods to equivalent STL classes/methods. Took less than a week, and now I'm happily working on a PIII running SuSE 7.0!

Haven't done serialization; that will be harder, but also more fun.

Now I'm trying to convince coworkers/boss that this MFC->STL wrapper might be a nice thing to open-source, as it will give us a bit of positive publicity, and that we might get help and testing from other users.

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